Deborah Lipstadt

Politics makes strange bedfellows, forcing us to ally ourselves with people whose views on other matters we do not share. How should we determine with whom to join hands and whom to reject? Some people have proposed a quantitative scale: If we agree on 75 percent of issues, then we can work together. I think our barometer must also be qualitative. Some differences are so beyond the pale that, even if I agree with most of your objectives, there is no room for compromise. I cannot join you. Such is the case with the current leadership of the national Women’s March.

The past two years have brought a seemingly unending stream of revelations about disparaging comments made by the British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, about Jews, Zionists, and Israel. But in recent days has come the lowest blow, with the emergence of a video from 2013. Corbyn, in speaking of people who approached the Palestine Liberation Organization representative to the United Kingdom to challenge points he had made in a talk, declared that such Zionists “clearly have two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony, either.”

For the past few decades, we have witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism from the left. From Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom to college campuses across America, the phenomenon is real, and it is dangerous. Yet, all too often, some Jews — both individuals and organizations — who inhabit the liberal or left end of the spectrum have tried to explain it away with the classic “yes/but” rationalization: “Yes, it’s wrong, but if only Israel would… then the anti-Semitism would disappear.” Maybe their fear of losing their left-wing bona fides blinded them to the fact that the only proper response to prejudice of any kind — anti-Semitism included — is unambiguous condemnation.

For the past few decades, we have witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism from the left. From Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom to college campuses across America, the phenomenon is real, and it is dangerous. Yet, all too often, some Jews — both individuals and organizations — who inhabit the liberal or left end of the spectrum have tried to explain it away with the classic “yes/but” rationalization: “Yes, it’s wrong, but if only Israel would… then the anti-Semitism would disappear.” Maybe their fear of losing their left-wing bona fides blinded them to the fact that the only proper response to prejudice of any kind — anti-Semitism included — is unambiguous condemnation.

Now, some of these same Jews are excoriating establishment Jewish leaders who have failed to condemn anti-Semitism from the right. They lambast these leaders for cozying up to Donald Trump and his newly appointed White House chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who has proudly supported the rise of the so-called “alt-right,” the self-serving marketing term for a group rife with anti-Semites and white supremacists.